Patti LuPone

The secret, of course, is that I don’t picture her first. I hear her voice. Her loud, brash, brassy voice. Actually, since I used to watch Life Goes On in the early ’90s, I think my first familiarity with her was on TV. Still, I haven’t seen that show since the early ’90s, whereas my familiarity with her Broadway work is more current and ongoing.

Patti LuPone is arguably heir to the tradition of bold Broadway dames such as Ethel Merman and Elaine Stritch. Indeed, she’s played both Mama Rose and Annie Oakley, as Merman did, and she’s played Joanne from Company, as Stritch did. She also made a fine Mrs. Lovett, though maybe I should rephrase that, all things considered.

Honestly, I’ve barely seen any of her screen work. Driving Miss Daisy, Summer of Sam, a few episodes of Law & Order and Frasier. The aforementioned Life Goes On, when I was in high school. Without her Broadway career, she’d mostly be familiar from that sort of thing; she has the kind of career that would have ended up on an episode of The Love Boat, a couple of decades earlier. This also means she’s not the sort of person we normally discuss in this column.

Still, if you want a champion of “the legitimate theatre,” there’s Patti LuPone. She has a firm anti-cell phone stance in her performances, making headlines for actually stopping a show to confront an idiot taking a flash picture. She believes that the theatre should be free of that sort of distraction, and if she has to force the issue herself, well, that’s just what she’s going to do. Nothing you can say will stop her.

Bernadette Peters, who I’m sure I’ll get to eventually, may do the “Broadway baby” routine, but that’s too timid for Patti LuPone. She may have suffered in relative silence through Evita, which was apparently a horrific experience for her (though she’s still good friends with Mandy Patinkin, who I’ll also get to eventually), but she’s certainly spoken out about it since then. “Silence” is not really her thing anymore. With a voice like hers, how could it be?